MHSD employees drill for active shooter

Personnel from the Mountain Home Police Department and the Mountain Home School District participate Tuesday in an active-shooter evacuation drill at Mountain Home High School.(Photo: Josh Dooley?The Baxter Bulletin)Buy Photo

Mountain Home School District faculty and staff got to experience the school’s lockdown and evacuation plan firsthand Tuesday as part of a training drill.

About 300 employees gathered at the Mountain Home High School to participate in the drill and play the roles of students. Law enforcement officers played the role of active shooters, firing off rounds of blank ammunition inside the high school’s halls and forcing the building to first be locked down and then evacuated to an off-site location.

The school conducted a similar drill three years ago. Tuesday’s drill was supervised by the district’s administrators, its crisis team and the district’s school resource officers, commonly called SROs.

“Unfortunately, we have to drill this type of thing, but we have a good team in place with an SRO at every campus to head it up and make it work,” Superintendent Dr. Jake Long said after Tuesday’s mock lockdown and evacuation. “We are very lucky to have educators who are prepared. They take the students’ safety very seriously.”

Two long hallways in the high school and numerous adjacent classrooms were used for the drill. Each classroom’s teacher was charged with grabbing nearby students out of the hall, locking their classroom doors, turning off the classroom lights and organizing the students to take shelter in a corner of the classroom.

Once the classrooms were locked down, teachers and students remained in place until they were visited by police officers, who first cleared the room and then delivered a series of instructions to the teacher to relay to their students.

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Mountain Home police officers put on an active shooter evacuation drill for Mountain Home Public School employees on Tuesday. The following images were captured during the drill.
Josh Dooley/The Baxter Bulletin

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Students and teachers were then evacuated classroom by classroom out of the high school and onto school buses, where they were transported off-site. In the event of an actual emergency, that off-site location would be where students would be released to their parents.

“I think it went well today,” Long said. “I feel like our crisis team is much more prepared — particularly at alternate site evacuations — than we ever have been before.”

Bang! Pop!

School district employees participating in Tuesday’s drill first gathered at Dunbar Auditorium before moving over to a series of classrooms at the high school.

Math teacher Ryder Pierce’s classroom — Room 702 — included 16 "students" seated in the classroom and three more "students" outside in the hallway.

Knowing what was to happen, the mood in the room was initially tense. As about 10 minutes ticked by, the demeanor of the room began to lighten. Pierce showed the room a massive cache of pencils he had in preparation for students asking for a writing instrument; another faculty member joked that the pencils would last a semester. Talk about floating the river or the weather — a large rainstorm had struck the high school campus minutes before the drill started — sprung up in different pockets of the room.

Then, the good-natured tranquility was shattered by two explosions outside in the hallway. Several "students" in Pierce’s classroom jumped and gasped, while others tried to both simultaneously jump up and duck down.

The two explosions were followed by a rapid series of more than a half-dozen smaller explosions. A video recorded in the hallway by The Bulletin showed law enforcement officers first discharging a shotgun twice, then firing a handgun multiple times.

Lockdown

In Pierce’s classroom, the math teacher first ran to the door and grabbed the students standing in the hall before locking the classroom door and engaging a secondary deadbolt. He then flipped the lights off and instructed students to take shelter in the corner of the room.

“Even as I was putting the lock into place I was thinking ‘I need to get the lights off and I need to tell everyone to stand up and move,’ ” Pierce said afterwards. “But the most important thing was to just get that thing locked and after that I can worry about the rest.”

"Students" in Pierce’s care seemed confused as to which corner they should huddle in, and Pierce had to take a second to shepherd everyone into the correct spot. Once assembled, everyone sat down on the floor and waited.

“I think it went pretty well,” Pierce said. “We try to keep the anxiety levels low in the rooms, but that’s hard, though. No one wants to practice that, but you have to.”

In less than a minute after the initial volley of gunfire, "students" were seated on the floor, the tart smell of gunpower hanging in the air.

A face appeared silhouetted by the hallway lights about a minute-and-a-half after the initial shots were fired, with someone rattling the doorknob and kicking the door. A few second later, a brief public address announcement said the school was now on lockdown.

About four-and-a-half minutes from the initial gunfire, people from other classrooms could be seen walking down the hallway with their hands in the air. About three minutes later, another group of "students" could be seen walking down the hallway, arms above their heads.

About eight minutes after the first shot was fired, there is forceful knock on Pierce’s door with the person identifying themselves as Mountain Home police.

Secondary locks

In the event of an emergency, Mountain Home faculty are instructed to lock their classroom and engage a secondary deadbolt that can only be opened from inside the classroom.

The secondary locks are a new addition to the school’s safety plan this year, Long said, and required the district to amend its emergency policies.

“The secondary locks were an item identified by the Mountain Home PTO, and it’s something that a lot of the schools have gone to,” he said.

The school district’s revised emergency policy is that once a classroom’s secondary locked in engaged, it is not unlocked unless the room is visited by police or a school administrator. Once the secondary lock is disengaged, a school resource officer or administrator will unlock the door using a key.

Pierce disengaged the door’s secondary lock, and a second later three police officers rushed into the math classroom to clear the area of dangers. Once clear, the officers gave Pierce instructions on where to move his "students" before leaving to sweep another room.

"Students" in Room 702 were told to walk single-file down the hallway and outside to a parked school bus, which then drove the students to an off-site location.

Only a test

Pierce’s class was on a school bus and headed to the off-site location roughly 12 minutes after the first shot was fired. That quick of an emergency response is just not possible in a real-life situation, Long warned.

“I would think it would be more in the hour-plus range, from the time we went on lockdown to the time in which we evacuate the students,” he said. “It will be a more extended period of time. Today, with the population that we had, it just went a lot quicker.”

Each building site will conduct its own lockdown drills with its students later this school year, he said.

In the event of an actual lockdown and evacuation, parents will be notified through the school’s instant messaging system. Students will be released to their parents or guardians at the off-site location, whose location will be relayed through the messaging system.

“It kind of goes against the grain to not pick up students at the school, but this is safer,” Long said. “Parents will need to pay attention to the instructions in the message.”

Parents or guardians may contact the school to sign up for the service or update their contact numbers.

“I know cell phone numbers are always changing, but please make sure those numbers are up-to-date in our student information system,” Long said.

Employees participating in Tuesday’s lockdown and evacuation drill were asked to provide feedback on the drill.

“Our staff knew what was coming, and real-life scenarios will be different,” Long said. “But overall we’re pleased and will debrief and make the improvements we need to make.”